Suspensions: Teaching leisure not lessons

Sleep in. Watch TV. Play computer games. Meet up with friends. Raid the fridge. Talk on the phone. Go to sleep. Repeat.

This was not winter break for former Blair student Sam Thresher. This was his punishment for getting caught intoxicated in class: a 10-day suspension that offered leisure and little work.

Thresher's situation is not uncommon: Many students who have been suspended say they considered their suspensions vacations, and students who have faced suspension at Blair are not a small minority. According to the Maryland State Department of Education, Blair administered 536 suspensions last school year - proportionally the second-highest suspension rate in Montgomery County.

While the number of suspensions at Blair has not increased from the previous year, school suspension rates are rising nationally. According to the most recent data published by the U.S. Department of Education, 30,000 more students were suspended in 2002 than in 2000.

As suspension rates remain high at both the national and local levels, students at Blair have growing doubts about the effectiveness of suspension as a punishment.

"Suspensions are B.S."

One Thursday last year, senior Tyrel Flowers-Jackson left school with three friends around 7 a.m. He and his friends heard a security guard yell after them as they walked off school grounds, but they didn't think much of it. When the boys returned to school two hours later with an excused tardy note from one of their mothers, the security guard exposed them for leaving school property that morning, which is against school policy. The four friends were suspended and told not to come back until the following Monday.

Flowers-Jackson remembers originally being frustrated by the suspension, which he felt he and his friends did not deserve. But by the time he left school grounds, he had no concerns. "My mom wasn't upset, so I was fine. I mean, hey, I got a day off of school!" he says.

Flowers-Jackson went back to one of the boys' houses and hung out with his friends the rest of that day. He spent his official suspension time on Friday at the mall, shopping. "The suspension didn't teach me anything," says Flowers-Jackson. He adds, "Basically, suspensions are B.S."

Assistant Principal Patricia Hurley, defending the use of suspensions as punishment in MCPS, explains that they are implemented for four basic reasons: to give a consequence for a misdeed, to act as a deterrent, to send a message to other students that misbehavior will not be tolerated and to maintain a safe learning environment.

But for Thresher, the lack of something constructive to do during his time out of school pushed him back towards the tendencies that had gotten him suspended in the first place. He was suspended during his freshman and sophomore years once for being intoxicated in class, twice for skipping school and the last time for illegal activities while skipping. Thresher has since dropped out of high school. Overall, he says the suspension periods were "pretty fun and relaxed" for him.

Stacy Skalski, director of public policy for the National Association of School Psychologists, confirms that many students view suspensions as free time. "Some kids seek suspension because they see it as a vacation from school. For these kids, it's a reward," rather than a punishment, she explains.

Falling behind

But academically, suspensions are not so rewarding. Sophomores Dylan Baird and Peter Lorenz, who were suspended for 13 days and 17 days respectively earlier this year for graffiti, found it hard to get back on track once they returned to school. "I had a lot of work to do to get back up to speed. If my teachers hadn't been lenient and excused a lot of my assignments, it would have been impossible to finish them all," says Lorenz.

During their suspensions, Baird and Lorenz both attended the Student Help and Academic Resource Program (SHARP), a program that aims to assist suspended students with both classwork and accepting responsibility for their actions. SHARP is not required for every suspended student, but Blair strongly recommends it to many students who are suspended for long periods of time, according to Doug Henley, director of SHARP.

Baird and Lorenz found that SHARP helped them academically during their suspension while also allowing them to have fun. "SHARP is so chill," says Baird, who spent many hours at the program reading books not for school, but for his own personal interest.

As Baird and Lorenz reminisce about SHARP, it's mostly smiles and laughs. One of their fondest memories was their special treat on Thursdays, which Henley calls "Homework Café." After working until around noon, the students got to order pizza and watch a movie. Students also brought in frozen fruit to make smoothies, an activity that Baird and Lorenz loved. Henley calls the break from schoolwork a "work hard, play hard situation."

But once the suspension ended, so did the fun, and going back to school was somewhat of a struggle for Lorenz. He says that having his assignments delivered to him at SHARP was useful, but it could only help so much. The instructions and lectures he missed from class were often necessary to complete the work, and some teachers did not communicate with him at all while he was suspended.

According to Skalski, instances like these where students fall behind in school are one reason why suspension should not be such a universal form of discipline. Instead, punishments should be tailored to each individual's misconduct. Still, Skalski understands why school systems, for the most part, choose not to do so: More specific punishments require more time spent devising them, as well as greater subjectivity and, therefore, more opportunities for disagreement.

But even Hurley admits suspension may not always be the best solution. "Do they work for everybody? No, they don't," she says.

Flowers-Jackson agrees, explaining, "Why are you gonna suspend a kid for skipping? You might as well force them to come to school - that would be more of a punishment than anything else."